Air Crew (1980)

Good movie but grossly overrated

Excellent but underrated film

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

I pretty like this movie not because of my special favor to aircraft disasters (although I like films like Turbulence or Airport) but because of outstanding bunch of actors starring here and because of our common knowledge that there were NO $ billions spent for effects. This film shows HOW you may do your job if you are a true PROFESSIONAL of cinema (and not just a guy who was chosen to spend much money for visual effects made by computer). If you may show great results without money, you are great. And this film is great. To Arik from Washington: I'm pretty sure you were a Soviet citizen :) People who came from USSR are often very hostile to anything produced there despite its real quality.

I've seen this movie, when I was only six or seven years old. I could mention, that I was very impressed by this movie. I could say, that this is outstanding work in Soviet cinematography. In '80 it was first thriller/disaster movie in Soviet Russia, where all sides of air crews' everyday life were shown. For us, Russians, this movie was more than simply "just another soviet movie", but movie, which tell to us "Look! Everyday is not calm and clear, everything is unstable". Also, this cinema is about love, family's life, every little thing in life of man as professional, as father, as husband, as good friend.This story is about group of good friends - pilots of Tu154B soviet airplane. One of them has a family - wife, daughter, others are single. As the one crew, they drive the airplane across the Soviet Union and also to the Europe. The life is calm and easy, day by day goes to the retire. But one day they were asked to go to Georgia to save people in disaster - the earthquake. During the escaping, the airplane was badly damaged to perform the successful landing, so the engineer has to go out the plane and fix the problem during the flight.So, this movie is very impressive, outstanding for '80s.

I rented the DVD for this movie because I remembered reading about it when I was a kid. With this film, the Soviet Union attempted to "cash in" on the success of western disaster films like "Earthquake" and "The Towering Inferno." I rented the movie because I thought it might be interesting from an historical standpoint.The film was about 20 minutes longer than it needed to be, and it suffers from too much set-up -- nothing disasterous happens until over an hour into the picture. But the carnage does eventually start, and those scenes are pretty good, especially the ones set at the airport located in a canyon. The effects crew did a remarkable job with what appeared to be meager resources.

Well, a lot of people in Europe and USA think that 99% percent of Russian films is dull boring stuff. Actually, it's right for many of them. However, 'The Crew' seems to be an exception. It tells us the story of three aircraft pilots; everyone of them with his own problems: a pregnant daughter (Timchenko), a lost child (Nenarokov), problems with woman (Skvortsov). But all of this is forgotten, when they need to make an awful race : from the burning city in the Middle East to Moscow. The burning airplane in the end of the film, and other technical tricks are really amazing. The common spirit of the film is not like that of western films-catastrophies, but it's more epic. Worth seeing, if you are interested in quiet films.